Three employees at China's most popular search engine, Baidu, found themselves out of a job today as they were fired and arrested for accepting money to delete posts from the company's forum site.

There's no word on what sort of posts were deleted, but Betty Tian, Baidu's spokesperson, told the BBC that the amount of money reached into the "tens of thousands of yuan" range.

In China, where every Internet company must comply with the country's strict censorship regulations, a number of illegal companies have arisen that will delete content from the Internet for a hefty price.

"Baidu has always firmly cracked down on the illegal behaviour of online posts deletion for payment," said Ms. Tian. "We have established that we will not accept any payment in handling online user complaints.